Dr, Touradj Ebrahimi

What if you could one day unlock your door or access your
bank account by simply “thinking” your password? Too far out? Perhaps
not.

Researchers at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, are exploring the
possibility of a biometric security device that will use a person’s
thoughts to authenticate her or his identity…

“Brain-wave signatures, represented as the EEG signals of a person …
are different from one individual to another, even when they perform the
same thought or task”, says professor Touradj Ebrahimi at the Swiss
Federal Institute of Technology.

But the very distinctiveness of brain waves that works against
researchers in developing universal tools is an asset when building an
authentication system. A security device wouldn’t need to interpret or
understand the thought, but simply extract the repeatable features of the
pattern and recognize a match. “A brain-based biometric can be as strong
as DNA-based biometric”, says Ebrahimi.

Touradj earned a M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at the
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in 1989,
took post-graduate courses in “Median and morphological filtering in
signal and image processing” at the
Tampere University of Technology in Tampere, Finland,
and earned a
Ph.D. in Digital Image Processing at the
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in 1992.
His mother tongue is Persian, he is fluent in French and English, and he
knows basic German, Italian, and Japanese.